The gang face their greatest challenge in-game in a seemingly impossible-to-beat mission. Meanwhile, both Meg and Nicky encounter complications to their respective romantic lives.

Gamers have all been there – that one level or mission that just repeatedly punishes you, seeing failure after failure, the repetition becoming automatic and almost hypnotic. Well, now Meg, Nicky, Usman and Russell are in that loop.

In the real world, meanwhile, Alison has booked a man to come and look at the boiler, leaving Nicky and Meg to fight it out as to which of them draws the short straw of having to interact with a ‘norm’. Nicky does his best but when Meg gets accidentally tagged in, she finds herself in an even more uncomfortable and unfamiliar territory than she might have imagined – being attracted to a norm…

Nicky has romantic issues of his own, as his attempts to pursue Daisy lead him into the orbit of the rest of her online admirers – a gang calling itself the Twelve Disciples, led by new character DVT and all of whom definitely have a less than normal interest in the girl and take it to wild and inappropriate extremes… with which Nicky of course ends up joining in enthusiastically.

Meg and Nicky aren’t the only ones with love in the air – Russell has got himself involved with a woman as well, but of course, it doesn’t sound like it’s any healthier a relationship than you’d expect. If anything, it sounds faintly terrifying.

Perhaps the best fun of the episode comes from the competition between its two leads, whether it’s for which of them might have the most debilitating illness, or which of their supposed ‘relationships’ is better. But that’s offset nicely by the rather unexpected ways in which they’re each able to do a lot better than they might have expected at interacting with other people. Beneath the layers of neuroses and the endless, grinding addiction to their game of choice are two rather unique and pleasant individuals, if only they’d allow themselves to realise it.

Verdict: Another slice of comedy gold, with a surprising amount of heart under the laughs. 9/10

Greg D. Smith